Pull the Other One

Ian Hacking

Late last autumn this book received a prodigious amount of attention in the United States. No one who has been exposed to any of the American media can have escaped it. Among the reactions was a chorus of élite liberal denunciations. The New Republic of 31 October ran a piece by Murray followed by 18 criticisms. Stephen Jay Gould spoke out in the New Yorker of 28 November. I especially recommend Alan Ryan’s analysis in the New York Review of Books of 17 November, followed in the 1 December issue by Charles Lane’s examination of some of the sources of statistical information in this book, sources closely connected with an Edinburgh publication, the Mankind Quarterly. Lane is particularly useful on Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster, who is cited 24 times in the book, but whose research will strike many readers as questionable.

The authors maintain that there is an accurate unitary measure of general intelligence, named g, first isolated in 1904 by the British psychologist Charles Spearman, who became Professor of Mind and Logic at University College London. (Our authors, and some of their critics, persist in referring to Spearman as a ‘former British Army officer’, which he was, but for goodness sake, he was professor at what was, in its day, the world centre for research on statistical inference, and took his doctorate at Leipzig, in its day the world centre for experimental psychology. This does not prove his work is valuable. Indeed I mistrust factor analysis, the technique he invented, and I am sceptical about g, but what game is being played by referring to Spearman simply as a military man?) Spearman’s g, claim Herrnstein and Murray, is a feature underlying what is measured in any plausible test for intelligence. Wary of the word ‘intelligence’, they write of ‘cognitive ability’, which, thanks to the prowess of modern cognitive sciences, sounds good, but they say the phrase means exactly, no more and no less, what intelligence testers call ‘intelligence’. Seeking vernacular but polite usage, they call people on the lower end of the IQ scale ‘dull’ and ‘very dull’. For people at the other end they often use the excellent American word ‘smart’, which gets the British ‘clever’, and ‘bright’ and ‘quick’ all at once.

Herrnstein and Murray hold that IQ, as measured, is distributed as what mathematicians call a Gaussian or normal distribution. Intuitively, this looks like a bell; hence the title of the book. The authors hold that the average IQ of East Asian populations is higher than that of white Americans (here they rely heavily on the dubious work of Professor Lynn). They correctly note that on average American blacks score substantially worse than American whites. They hold that IQ is partially inherited, which they manifestly believe, but they do insert words of caution and rightly note that many of their theses do not depend on genetically transmitted IQ.

Herrnstein and Murray compile and tabulate an immense amount of information from many sources. Their original contribution is based on the national Longitudinal Survey of Labour Market Experience of Youth. Starting in 1979, this survey has been tracking about 12,500 young Americans, following not only their family background, education, employment, marriage and child-bearing, but measuring their IQ. This unique resource enables our authors to show that IQ is a fairly good predictor of many social variables – educational attainment, unemployment, salary when employed, pregnancy in and out of wedlock. In the earliest part of the book they provide results for white Americans only, and show that low IQ predicts, with some probability, numerous bad events or qualities, while high IQ predicts good ones. Men are studied chiefly as solid workers or the opposite, unemployed or criminals. Women are studied chiefly as solid homemakers or the opposite, single mothers on welfare. When it is careful, the book restrains itself to the language of prediction and correlation, but often it lapses, and speaks of cause or effect; low IQ as a cause of poverty, unemployment or illegitimate births.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

[*] Checking out The Bell Curve’s 108 pages of notes can provide hours of innocent pleasure. The book does not exactly quote Malinowski, but takes his words from Senator Moynihan quoting from a book of reprinted essays. Had the authors gone back to the source, they might have been displeased at the company Malinowski kept. For the quotation comes from a 1930 book of essays, The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Parents and Children, edited by V.F. Calverton and S.D. Schmalhausen. I think none of Malinowski’s fellow contributors, from Margaret Mead down, agreed with him. Most were moved by the Marxist thought that legitimacy is demanded only by property and inheritance. One of the editors has a very stirring defence of the illegitimate child – modern society ‘has never failed to place property above personality or to sacrifice life for a formula’. The rich cream on this wonderful pudding is provided by Bertrand Russell’s glorious Introduction, which includes his exultant cry: ‘Enter the new feminism trailing the new matriarchate!’

Letters

Ian Hacking’s review of The Bell Curve (LRB, 26 January) brought to mind an experience of R.A.C. Oliver’s in Kenya in 1930, which demonstrates that the interaction between culture and intelligence tests can have unexpected results. Oliver was then a young psychologist who had studied with Godfrey Thomson at Edinburgh and Lewis Ternan at Stanford. He was sent to Kenya by the Carnegie Corporation to develop an intelligence test that would provide the basis for an ongoing search for talented children among blacks in the colony. The test would be used to identify able students to attend the bush schools, the local secondary schools. It was hoped that these students would complete their schooling successfully and go on to become teachers. No white students were involved in the research. In considering what kinds of question to include in his test, Oliver experimented with the Porteus Maze Test that had been widely used in Europe and the United States and was considered to be a useful test of nonverbal intelligence. He reported the outcome as follows:

In these tests, the subject is presented with the printed plan of a maze, and he has to trace with a pencil the path he would follow in getting to the centre of the maze. If he enters blind alleys, he fails. The mazes form a series, graded in difficulty, and constituting an age scale of intelligence. A European child, when he reaches a maze beyond his mental age, tends to enter a blind alley and explore it to the end, and then to retrace his path to the entrance of the blind alley and go on again. He penetrates to the centre of the maze quickly enough, but with many errors. The typical procedure of the Africans tested was different. The subject would study the maze for many minutes without making a move; then he would trace his path to the centre without hesitation or error. The test had to be abandoned as a test of intelligence [in Oliver’s project], for even the most difficult mazes in the series were solved in this way by too many of the subjects.

Oliver went on to develop a test that proved to be useful in the Kenyan context. He later became the Sarah Fielden Professor of Education at Manchester University and a talented examiner for the Joint Matriculation Board, where he developed the widely used A-level examination in General Studies.